This chapter is from the book

Everyone has personal workspace preferences, and they often defy default recommendations. Who says you should map Lift and Extract to the Z and X keys? Who says the Timeline always has to be at the bottom of the screen?

Xpress Pro gives you more than enough personal control over the look and layout of tools and windows. By mapping buttons to the keyboard and interface, you can edit in a way that is most intuitive to you and most compatible with your unique approach to editing. Furthermore, thanks to custom toolsets and workspaces, you can group together various tools for different workflow situations, such as editing, color correction, or audio work, and then map the trigger for each particular tool grouping to your keyboard.

Taking the time to create personal settings tailored to your needs will pay off when you get an Xpress Pro job at another location. Simply bring your own customized user profile along on a disk and load it in, and you'll have all of your familiar keyboard shortcuts, color and appearance settings, window arrangements, and favorite buttons instantly at your fingertips.

Understanding User, Project, and Site Settings

The Xpress Pro settings, all found on the Settings tab of the Project window (Figure 3.1), are grouped into three categories. Understanding how these groups of settings differ from one another is the key to understanding how Xpress Pro views settings and will help you navigate the myriad customizable features.

User settings:
User settings address questions such as "What color do you want your buttons?" and "How are your windows arranged?"These settings are linked to the user profile you select in the User Profile Selection pop-up menu at the top of the Settings tab in the Project window. (For more information, see "Creating and Selecting a User Profile" later in this chapter.)

Project settings:
Project settings address questions such as "Is the project NTSC or PAL?" and "Are you using drop-frame or nondrop-frame timecode?"These settings are tied to a particular project, and you may have different settings for different projects.

Site settings:
Site settings address questions such as "Is your DV deck connected via FireWire or through the serial port?" and "Should the system automatically be connected to a LANshare when you launch Xpress Pro?"These settings pertain to your editing system's particular hardware and don't change unless you change your overall system setup.

Figure 3.1 The Settings tab of the Project window lists User, Project, and Site settings. If you prefer, you can click the Settings tab Fast menu to display only active settings or selected settings. The window shown here displays all settings.

Transferring Your Custom Settings to a Different Xpress Pro Workstation

User settings:
If you plan to work on another Xpress Pro editing system, then you should bring your personal user profile folder with you on a disk or over a network. But where do you find your user settings on your current system so you can make a copy?

You can find your user profile folder in the following locations (for Windows users, this is assuming that your program files are stored on drive C; if it's stored elsewhere, substitute that drive letter):

The user settings file itself is named user name Settings (Windows) or user name Settings.avs (Macintosh). However, when you want to import or copy your personal settings, make sure to import or copy your entire user profile folder, not just the individual file with your user name.

Once you are at the new workstation, copy your user profile folder from the disk or its network location onto the desktop or anywhere else on the new workstation. Open Xpress Pro on the new workstation and choose Import User or User Profile from the User Selection pop-up menu. Find the user profile folder and click Choose. You can now use all of your personal Keyboard settings, window layouts, and so on.

Project settings:
When you need to transfer an entire project to another workstation, then you need to bring along your project folder as well as your source media files.

You can find your project folder, which includes two project setting files and all project bin files, in the following locations (for Windows users, this is assuming that your program is stored on drive C; if it's stored elsewhere, substitute that drive letter):

(You can find shared project folders—as opposed to private project folders—one level up from the locations described here; in other words, you can access shared folders directly from the Avid Projects folder.)

Site settings:
Normally, you do not need to transfer site settings to another workstation because those settings are specific to your particular hardware configuration. Nevertheless, to find your site setting file on your computer, look for a file with the following naming scheme: Site_Settings (Windows) or Site Settings.avs (Macintosh).

You can find your site settings in the following locations (for Windows users, this is assuming that your program is stored on drive C; if it's stored elsewhere, substitute that drive letter):